Brickout Deluxe Pro review (iOS / Universal)

10 word review: Personalised leaderboards… fair enough, but the game is very basic.

You will like this if you enjoy: Beating your Facebook friends at games that they probably won’t stick with for very long. Simplistic Breakout style games.

This is the part where yawning is your only option

The good news: The personalised Facebook leaderboards are (more) interesting (than the rest of the game).

The bad news: Pedestrian gameplay, becoming quite tiresome in the latter stages of each level when you’re sitting around waiting for the ball to hit the last block. IAPs to buy power-ups that could conceivably make the game a little bit more fun; so thanks for that. The paddle jumps to your finger position when you touch the screen, which is actually not as helpful as it sounds. Double-tap to deploy a power-up is often accidentally triggered.

Hardly the most imaginative screen layouts

Arcadelife verdict: While the “revolutionary social twist” (Facebook leaderboards) is a nice idea, the game itself is quite bland and not particularly exciting. The flaw with a lot of Breakout style games is the anticlimactic tedium of hitting the last few blocks, and it’s definitely the case with Brickout. A power-up to automatically zap the last 3 bricks would go a long way to making this game a lot more fun. Comparing Brickout to something like Ricochet Infinity wouldn’t even be fair, so I won’t.